Image: Jacob’s Dream by Marc Chagall
Summary: Jacob’s deceiving of his father Isaac and his brother Esau forced him to flee his family and embark on a long journey. While on that journey, he had a surprising encounter with God during a dream. Like Jacob—and Odysseus in the Odyssey–when our journeys reach down into heart and soul, and challenge us to change and grow, they are sacred journeys.
Scripture: Genesis 28:10-19
The movie The Odyssey came out this week. Has anyone seen it already?
Apparently some theaters have been sold out for weeks–my brother-in-law in Chicago bought his ticket to see The Odyssey on IMAX about two months ago, and he’s going to see it this afternoon.
Of course the movie is a remake of the story by Homer, which scholars estimate was written about 800 BCE, and it’s one of the foundational classics of Greek literature.
The Odyssey recounts Odysseus’ long and epic journey from the battle of Troy back to his home in Ithaca to be reunited with his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus.
I thought it was serendipitous that The Odyssey opens up the same weekend that the story of Jacob’s dream along his journey is the Old Testament scripture from the weekly lectionary readings in the church calendar.
Because if you compare them, Odysseus’ journey and Jacob’s journey have a lot of parallels. Both spend about 20 years away from home before returning to their homeland.
Both are accompanied by divine beings—Odysseus by the goddess Athena and Jacob by the God of the Bible. Both encounter lots of challenges along the way, and both are impacted in important ways as a result of those challenges.
Also, both have confrontations which test their strength and character—for example, Odysseus fights a cyclops, and Jacob wrestles with an angel, later on after his dream of the stairway to heaven.
Now to understand Jacob’s story better, we need to look at what led him on his journey in the first place. Why did he leave Beer-sheba and set out for Haran?
In a sense, we could say that Jacob is running away from home. Any of you ever run away from home when you were younger? Why did you leave?
Jacob left home because things got pretty bad, largely due to his own choices and actions. Basically he had become a villain, a persona non grata in his own family.
When his brother Esau is so hungry that he’s about to die, Jacob offers him food only if Esau turns over his inheritance to him. Later, when their dad Isaac is blind and appears ready to die, Jacob deceives Isaac to rob Esau of their father’s blessing by putting some fur on his body to trick Isaac into thinking he’s his hairier brother Esau.
Jacob has burned all his bridges with his family and with their God, so he hightails it out of town, fleeing for his life like a fugitive. With only the clothes on his back, he heads toward his family’s ancestral town of Haran, unsure of when or if he will make it there.
At the end of his first day on his journey, Jacob stops to rest for the night. I guess he left his pillow and his stuffies behind, so he uses a rock for his pillow. And that’s when he has the dream about the ladder, the stairway to heaven.
Now in the ancient world there weren’t ladders like the kind we get at Ace Hardware or Lowe’s. But there were staircases that were built into structures called Ziggurats, which were temples erected by kings and nobility as a way to connect with their gods. Sounds like a place where that cartoon character Ziggy would have lived!
The Babylonians made lots of Ziggurats, and some of those structures are still standing in places like Iraq and Iran. Some people say that the Tower of Babel that is described in Genesis 11 was an example of a Ziggurat.
In any case, the stairway that Jacob sees in his dream is a powerful encounter with God—it has angels descending and ascending between heaven and earth, and God has a heart to heart with Jacob during his dream.
Now based on Jacob’s behavior which led to his skipping town, it would be natural to think that God would not want to have anything to do with Jacob right now. What Jacob deserves here is not a connection with God through a stairway to heaven.
Time for a little story. Up until recently, there was a sign hanging in a music store in southern California that said “No Stairway to Heaven”. Here’s the backstory:
When my older brother Ed graduated from college with a music degree, our dad bought a music store called Cassell’s in the San Fernando Valley and had Ed manage the store.
Cassell’s was truly a family-run business, as several of my siblings worked in the store in different capacities. Ed just sold the store last year, after running it for 48 years.
Now Cassell’s music store gained some notoriety in the movie industry. Some scenes of the recent movie Obsession were filmed at Cassell’s. Also, does anyone remember the 1992 movie “Wayne’s World”?
There’s a scene in Wayne’s World where Wayne and Garth, played by Mike Myers and Dana Carvey, are in a music store trying out a cool white guitar. That’s Cassell’s. And for the movie, a sign was put on the wall saying “No Stairway to Heaven”.
In other words, people are not supposed to play the intro to that classic Led Zeppelin song. (Maybe because so many people did it the employees got tired of it!). My brother left the sign up, along with the white guitar in a glass case, all the way until he sold the store. Fans of Wayne’s World from around the world came to see it.
When I was thinking about Jacob’s dream as I prepared my sermon, I couldn’t help but think of that “No stairway to heaven” sign. And even though Jacob didn’t deserve that kind of close encounter with God,
God in God’s great mercy and love didn’t give up on Jacob. Instead, God made Jacob’s journey a sacred journey through reaching down to him on the stairway with the angels as God’s messengers. Maybe we could say they were like guardian angels to Jacob along his journey.
Here’s Russian-French artist Marc Chagall’s painting of Jacob’s dream.
I consulted Copilot AI to explore the meaning of the painting, and it said that Chagall’s lifelong experience as a Jewish exile infuses the paintings with emotional weight. The ladder becomes a symbol of:
Escape from danger, spiritual continuity in spite of being displaced, and the fragile safety of Jewish life in the 20th century. The holocaust took place in that century, and I wonder if Chagall painted it today what it would look like, in light of the atrocities that Israel is committing against Palestinians in Gaza.
I also read that the painting is like a spiritual autobiography for Chagall, a testament to the enduring possibility of divine encounter.
As I thought about it, I wondered if the idea of “divine encounter” is something that is diminishing in people’s minds as a result of the modern, rational world we live in, where reality is defined almost exclusively by what we can physically see and touch.
I believe that we’ve all been influenced by the modern worldview, and the result is that it makes us skeptical of divine encounters, experiences of a supernatural nature. As a result, we can be like Jacob who didn’t expect God to show up in his life.
But God does show up, and finds ways to get our attention, maybe through dreams like Jacob had, or through things like prayer or silence, or in nature, or through acts of love and kindness, big and small.
Sometimes we miss out on those divine encounters because we’re like snails curled up in our shell and we don’t have our antennae up.
God’s presence is everywhere; we just have to be ready to pay attention and notice it. I love what Richard Rohr says about this. He says,
“We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already totally in the presence of God. What’s absence is awareness.”
It’s understandable that Jacob didn’t have his antennae up to experience God’s presence. After all, he must have felt unworthy to be in God’s presence after the sins he had committed against his family.
I think if we’re honest, we all can think of times when that has been true in our own lives—We feel far away from God, and that God has given up on us. So we give up on God as well.
King David knew the reality and devastation of sin; he lays his heart out about his sin with Bathsheba in Psalm 51 in a raw and honest prayer of confession and repentance.
And later on in Psalm 139, that same David gives a passionate affirmation of God’s presence in every place and situation, God’s omnipresence we might say:
Lord, you have examined me. You know me.
2 You know when I sit down and when I stand up.
Even from far away, you comprehend my plans.
3 You study my traveling and resting. You are thoroughly familiar with all my ways.
You surround me—front and back. You put your hand on me.
6 That kind of knowledge is too much for me; it’s so high above me that I can’t reach it. 7 Where could I go to get away from your spirit? Where could I go to escape your presence?
The Swiss theologian Hans Ur Balthasar said, “Scripture is clear that sin is real and devastating, yet it is not the deepest truth about a human being.”
Friends, the deepest truth is that God is always with us, God will never abandon us, and God will always love us, no matter what. As the children’s book says, Mostly what God does is love you.
Friends, God’s constant presence and love for us have the power to make every encounter, every experience holy, and every journey a sacred journey.
And we know from Jacob’s journey that it truly was a sacred journey. Because of God’s presence, his promises, and unconditional love, Jacob ended up a changed man.
God’s promises to Jacob of land, and offspring, and blessings, and protection, and a return to his homeland all came to fruition, because of God’s mercy and grace.
I like how the South African theologian Julianna Claassens put it. She says:
“It is significant that God’s interruption of Jacob’s anxious journey…does not contain a word of judgment regarding Jacob’s prior actions with regard to his brother and his father. Rather God’s address to Jacob contains one unconditional promise after the other.
In this grace-filled encounter…this trickster who has deceived his father and brother, and who since birth has lived in strife with the people around him, can be transformed by God into a richly blessed man who serves as a source of God’s blessing to others.”
If we think back on Jacob’s life, we see him as someone who is self-serving—focused only on getting blessings for himself—like from his father, and from God in his wrestling match with the angel, where he says’ “I won’t let go of you until you bless me!”
But on Jacob’s sacred journey, God turned his selfish heart into a generous heart that learned the joy that comes from being a blessing to others—when he returned home, he freely shared his possessions with his brother Esau as an expression of his love for him.
Have you heard that phrase, “The joy is in the journey”? I think there’s a lot of truth in that saying. The paradox of it is that sometimes that joy comes through really painful and challenging experiences on the journey.
We see that paradox clearly in both Jacob’s journey as well as Odysseus’ journey. Notice in the maps of Odysseus’ journey that Troy was actually really close to Ithaca, and it shouldn’t have taken him 20 years to make that journey.
But situations and setbacks stretched his journey across land and sea for miles and miles. And every step of the way he had experiences which challenged him and ultimately helped him to grow. That’s the joy in the journey.
Social media has been blowing up with people reflecting on The Odyssey movie and the journey of Odysseus. I want to share a couple of quotes I read on Threads. First, by officialdanadargos:
“We live in a culture obsessed with endings. The promotion. The wedding. The bestseller. The dream job. The “made it” moment. But the Odyssey reminds us that the destination isn’t what changes us. The journey does. Odysseus doesn’t become who he is when he finally reaches Ithaca. He becomes that person through every loss, every setback, every impossible choice, and every mile that came before it.”
And one by hmharen, looking more inside the soul:
“Every journey home is ultimately an inward one…every character in the Odyssey represents a different part of the human psyche…Odysseus is not merely battling monsters or gods—he is confronting grief, pride, guilt, fear, temptation, and the fractured parts of himself.”
When our journeys reach down into heart and soul, and challenge us to change and grow, they are sacred journeys. They are divine encounters. Odysseus’ journey involved the gods of his world.
Jacob’s journey involved the same God that you and I worship. And as Christians, God’s presence is made real to us through Jesus and his Holy Spirit.
Our journeys in life can be actual physical journeys, where we travel through water by boat, or on land by things with wheels—planes, trains, automobiles, bikes or wheelchairs; or through walking on our own two feet.
Or our journeys can also be figurative, like our job or career can be a journey, a marriage or other relationship can also be a journey. And of course our overarching journey is our journey of walking with God and Jesus through life.
Whichever journeys we are on, let’s see them as sacred journeys, where God’s presence and love constantly accompany us. I heard someone say that God is a migrant God who is always on the move with God’s people.
And let’s remember that God is creative enough to show up in full-color IMAX ways like Jacob’s dream of the stairway to heaven,
And God can also show up in small, gentle ways as we go through our daily lives, like in a sunset, a song that moves us, or a smile or act of kindness that lifts our spirits. I read a quote recently where someone said:
“I asked an elderly traveler, ‘after all these years, what is one thing that you pack for every single trip?’ He said ‘Curiosity’. ‘Everything else can be bought along the way.’ “The best travelers don’t know more. They simply notice more.”
So let’s stay curious, so we can notice God’s presence in both the mysterious and the mundane of our lives. All of the ways that God works can be sacred and can shape our inner journey—
They can chisel away at the fractured parts of us, those things that long for God’s holy touch, inviting us to confront them, and confess them, so we can find healing, become more whole and be transformed into the likeness of Jesus whom we follow and serve.
Prayer: Thank you, God, for your faithfulness to Jacob along his journey. Thank you for the ways in which you showed up to remind him of your presence and love for him. Your promises and your power transformed him along his sacred journey. Help us to be more aware of your presence and your power as we go through our journeys in life; help us to stay curious and open to the ways that you want to teach us and transform us through the challenges and obstacles we encounter along the way. Lord Jesus, may you be the song that we sing and proclaim, and may our lives reflect your peace, your joy and your love. Amen.
